People Who Smoke at Young Age at Higher Risk of Problems Later On

Body A study, released by the Health Behavior News Service, showed that adolescents who have tried cigarettes by seventh grade are much more likely to become regular smokers and to engage in high risk behaviors later on, such as selling drugs and binge drinking.

“We were struck by the degree to which early smoking appeared to indicate that kids were on the fast track toward a troubled adolescence,” said Phyllis Ellickson, Ph.D., who led the team of researchers at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, Calif. “We wanted to find out what factors in early and later adolescence might help these high-risk kids avoid negative consequences.”

The study appears in the October issue of the Journal of Adolescent Health.

The researchers collected data at seventh, 10th and 12th grade from 2,000 students in California and Oregon who were early smokers in middle school. At the beginning of middle school, 30 percent of the early smokers had recently used cigarettes, 14 percent were smoking regularly and 21 percent had multiple school problems, the authors wrote.

Ellickson and her colleagues found that having peers who smoke was a strong risk factor for becoming a regular smoker.

By the end of high school, 36 percent of early smokers were smoking regularly and 58 percent had engaged in two or more problem behaviors, including binge drinking, abusing and selling drugs and dropping out of school, according to the study.

The researchers found that teens who had not tried smoking by seventh grade were 1.5 times more likely to be those who had good grades and lived in an intact family. The RAND researchers concluded that teens whose parents disapproved of smoking and drug use had lower risks of problem behavior. They suggested that universal prevention programs that target peer resistance and parental involvement could help reverse the trends found in the study.